St Ethelbert, Burnham Sutton

The modern town of Burnham Market is an amalgam of three historic parishes, Burnhams Sutton, Ulph and Westgate. St Ethelbert was the parish church of Sutton, and sat about four hundred metres south of the green in the centre of Burnham Market, beside the road to Fakenham. The Parishes of Sutton and Ulph were united as early as the 15th Century, and it seems likely that the two villages had grown into each other by then. However, this state of affairs virtually guaranteed that resources would become rather stretched once the Reformation turned them into preaching houses. By the middle of the 18th Century, both churches had, in common with so many in East Anglia, fallen into disrepair. Their rector, the go-ahead young Edmund Nelson who would go on to be the father of Admiral Horatio Nelson, oversaw the demolition of St Ethelbert and the use of its materials to repair All Saints, Burnham Ulph.

What survives are the walls of the aisle-less nave to a height of half a metre or so, and the tower walls to about a metre. Curiously, the tower was built within the body of the earlier nave, as at Thurton in east Norfolk. The chancel is now lost beneath the adjacent road. The tower remains were higher, but were thought to be dangerous in 1966 and reduced. For a long time after, the site was allowed to become overgrown, and mostly disappeared, but it was all cut back and dug out by the admirable Burnham Market Society in the early 1990s. Even so, it did seem a bit overgrown to me when I came back in 2022.

It is a satisfying ruin. You can see where everything was, and you can even step over the threshold of the south doorway as your ancestors might have done. On the ground to the south is the village hall, and back in 2006 I had found the weekly farmers market in progress. I was delighted to discover from one of the stall holders that locals still called this place St Albert's Corner.

Simon Knott, May 2022

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Burnham Deepdale - Burnham Norton - Burnham Overy - Burnham Sutton - Burnham Thorpe - Burnham Ulph - Burnham Westgate